Page:Oswald Bastable and Others - Nesbit.djvu/396

348 on her finger, and the fly watched her with all its hundreds of eyes.

Now, you will, perhaps, have guessed that this fly was not an ordinary fly, and you are right. But if you think he was an enchanted Prince or anything of that sort you are wrong. The fly was simply the cleverest fly of all flies—someone must be the cleverest in any society, you know—and he was just clever enough to like to be where the Princess was, and to look at her beauty with all his hundreds of eyes. He was clever enough to like this and to know that he liked it, but he was not clever enough to know why.

So now, as the Princess stood fingering her ring and trying to make her mind up, he gave an interested buzz, and the Princess jumped.

'Oh,' she said, 'it's only a horrid fly! But it has wings. It must be lovely to have wings. I wish I were a fairy no bigger than that fly.'

And instantly she and her silver-trained gown, and her silver shoes, and the magic ring, and everything about her, grew suddenly small, till she was just as big as the fly and no bigger, and that is flower-fairy size. Silver gauze wings grew out of her shoulders; she felt them unfolding slowly, like a dragon-fly's wings when he first